


Love Sold, Hope Dead, and Honour Broken

by the_rck



Series: House of Sulfur and Mercury [10]
Category: Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artificial Intelligence, Captivity, Dysfunctional Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 21:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13533090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Dalt meets Ghostwheel who scares the shit out of him. He then meets Merlin who impresses him rather less.





	Love Sold, Hope Dead, and Honour Broken

**Author's Note:**

> Oblique references to past rape, both canonical and within past installments of this AU.
> 
> Title from Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England.”
> 
> My best guess is that this is going to end up in the same general branch of the AU as We Are Where We Began, but what's here so far doesn't contradict it fitting with At the Edge of Centuries. If (when?) I add chapters, I will pin things down further.
> 
> The master list for this series of branching AUs and what branches from which changes is [here](https://somethingdarker.dreamwidth.org/36076.html).

I've never slept heavily. Too much risk of a midnight raid. Dying wasn't attractive, but getting caught-- My father's family considers blinding people as minor fun, a way to get someone out of the way for a while.

Like them, I'd heal, but having my eyes burned out-- I know pain. I don't want it.

Anyway, the power woke me. I hadn't done a lot with Trump, but this was like an explosion right on top of me. It just wasn't one I could escape.

Don't get me wrong. I tried, but I was suddenly in a place where I couldn't breathe. Everything I pulled in burned my lungs. I tried to shift Shadow, but my feet found no purchase, so I flailed until I passed out.

At that point, I hoped I wasn't going to wake up.

I did, of course. I was naked and strapped to a table. There was an old woman I didn't recognize standing by the table.

She frowned at me. “Ghostwheel thinks you'll try to kill me if I let you loose.” Her tone was mild, but I was pretty sure she knew that Ghostwheel, whoever that might be, wasn't wrong. “It's a problem,” she said. “I'm supposed to give you a physical.”

“He’s fine.” 

I couldn't see the speaker, and the voice sounded… not human. I turned my head.

“He is the circle of light.” The woman pointed at a speck that grew into something the size of my fist. She looked at it the way Mother used to look at someone really promising who kept fucking up-- a little indulgence hidden by severity.

“I am Ghostwheel.” The words definitely came from the light. “I brought you here.” There was a little sulkiness in the words. “You weren't supposed to wake up halfway.”

“The enemy's always going to fuck up your plans.” I didn't particularly want it-- him, the woman had said 'him’ --getting better at kidnapping, but that was so basic that it wasn't giving him anything at all. “That's the point of being enemies.”

I looked at the woman. “I don't need a physical.”

She gave me a look that said she was completely unimpressed. “We’re establishing a baseline.” She said it as if it explained everything.

“Merlin said,” the spinning wheel of light announced, “that I should tell you that Gerard couldn’t break those straps.”

Which might mean I could use the straps to break the table. It was possible and better than waiting for whatever the hell passed for a physical here. The woman looking harmless didn’t fool me at all.

I recognized the name Merlin, of course. Jasra’s twins had been darlings, and Merlin son of Corwin-- and therefore my nephew-- had fathered them. I’d steered clear of meeting the poor sod because I didn’t want that mess smeared all over me, not with Rinaldo in over his head, too.

I’d fucked up that decision apparently. I should have yanked Rinaldo out of there before Jasra being stupid sucked him down, too.

I’d hoped that he hadn’t been caught in whatever destroyed Jasra’s keep, but I suspected that neither of us had gotten that lucky.

I hadn’t been able to figure out what the hell happened to the place. The remaining stones pulsed with a power that made me want to hurl, but that no one else seemed to notice. My men hadn’t found Rinaldo or Jasra or any sign of children. Nor had there been any indication of an attack by a large force.

I left my men searching and looked for any Shadow trails. Jasra’s was pretty damned easy to find. Broken Pattern was faster than using shapeshifting for moving through Shadow, but it left a much bigger trail. Whatever Brand had said, shapeshifting was a better tool for shit ton of purposes; Jasra might’ve gotten away if she’d used shapeshifting. Anyway, I followed the Broken Pattern until I found her corpse-- probably her corpse-- The trail ended there. The head was gone, and the rest had been there for a while. I’m pretty sure she didn’t die easy.

Which made me think that, whatever was going on, I wasn’t going to die easy either.

The woman started by listening to my lungs. She frowned. “Do you smoke?”

“No.” I gave a very pointed look at Ghostwheel. If the woman was noticing something wrong with my breathing it was for pretty damned sure because of that place halfway.

“Then the damage will likely heal, given your family.” She glanced at Ghostwheel then added softly, “He does what he does.” Her hands were warm, but the way she touched me told me that she had no intention of making an emotional connection.

Which made Ghostwheel my best play if I was going to be stuck. I didn’t plan to be, but I also had planned to wake up in the same damned place I’d gone to bed. So, while the woman drew blood for some purpose or another, I kept my eyes on Ghostwheel. “Why?” I said at last.

Ghostwheel made an odd noise. “Martin said you’re inconvenient but that your brothers and sisters want you alive. I could, so I did.” His voice hardened into something that was very definitely threat. “I can put you into much, much worse places than that one. Places nothing you can do will work.”

At least, then, I’d die fast. I closed my eyes for a moment.

“Merlin wants you to be comfortable,” Ghostwheel said. He sounded as if he didn’t understand the concept. “I think you’ll cooperate better if you know the alternatives.”

“Ghostwheel,” the woman said mildly, “threaten him when I’m not trying to get his baseline pulse and blood pressure.”

“Yes, Sibyl.” The small light winked out.

“That doesn’t mean he’s gone,” Sibyl told me. “He’s always watching, him or one of the others like him.” She fiddled with the blood pressure cuff. “Lord Merlin’s… neutrality about you cuts both ways.”

It took me a moment to fit those words together, and while it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I didn’t like the picture at all. Merlin didn’t hate me-- yet-- so he wasn’t likely to torture me, but he also didn’t actually like me enough to protect me from anyone else.

“What is Ghostwheel?”

Sibyl shrugged. “Lord Merlin’s oldest child. I’ve never seen him as anything but a light. He can move things and people from place to place and be anywhere. Beyond that, you’ll have to ask him or to ask Lord Merlin.” She hesitated for a moment. “He’s very protective of people he likes.”

“And he likes you.”

“Sometimes.” She offered me some water through a straw, and I took it. “He’s changed a lot in the last dozen years.”

She actually needed some cooperation from me for the next bits, so I smiled and offered not to kill her if she gave me information. She eyed the table then eyed me. “That would be singularly unwise,” she said.

She wasn’t talking about the giving me information part.

She told me that Merlin had started ‘building his Ways’ somewhere between fifteen and twenty years before, that different parts had different natural laws.

That didn’t sound like any sort of Shadow manipulation that I knew anything about, but Jasra had said the Courts of Chaos were very different.

All the people in the Ways were refugees. “Ghostwheel rescued all of us,” she said. “The worlds we came from were very, very different, so it’s been… We’ve had to adapt. The atheists had the hardest time, but Lord Merlin and his kin are very clearly gods.” She gave me a look that said she knew we weren’t, not exactly, but that we might as well be. “He asks for loyalty and service rather than worship.”

And her people gave it. Because, of course, they did. The other options were worse.

“He has been good to us.”

Was there the slightest extra emphasis on that last word? I thought so which meant I could assume there were not-us people he had not been good to.

“It is likely,” she went on as she peered into my throat, “that almost no one will even know you’re here. Only those of us who need to.”

So… a cell somewhere. If Ghostwheel could do what Sibyl said he could, there wouldn’t even have to be a door.

I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “I have to,” I said. That was as much apology, as much warning as I could afford. 

She took three rapid steps backward as I used the straps Gerard couldn’t break as leverage to destroy the table under me. Breaking it into three pieces didn’t really give me mobility, but it was enough to let me try the Pattern-- which didn’t work-- and try to reach the door anyway.

Ghostwheel only let me get about halfway there. He used some sort of tendrils of power to pluck the bits of table away from me then yanked me into another Shadow while my stomach was trying to turn inside out.

Deep water during a storm with no land in sight.

A place with a sky of flames and ground hot enough to sear my feet.

Falling from a great height toward distant mountains.

Cold, damp, darkness.

Things that slithered. Things that crawled. Things that bit or stung.

Ice and silence. 

On the ground and tiny in the midst of a riot.

Desert so dry that I could barely draw breath.

Ghostwheel’s voice in my ear said, “Need more?”

I shook my head.

I was in an empty room with stone walls and floor and no company. The only doorway led to a small room with a toilet, a sink, and a shower.

Sibyl not being there was a real pity because I could have used help cleaning my burned feet.

Then again, doing that kept me from thinking. If I let myself think, I was going to start trying to take down the walls with my fists, and even Gerard couldn’t have managed that.

About the time I was trying to figure out how to keep the soles of my feet clean without crawling around with all of my weight on my kneecaps until the damned things healed, someone just outside the door to the bathroom cleared his throat.

As soon as I looked up, I could tell that he wasn’t really there. There was a shimmering aura around him, and his feet weren’t quite where the floor was. I lunged at him anyway, just in case, and going straight through him both told me that he was some sort of Trump projection and got me into the larger room. More space probably wouldn’t help, but him blocking the only exit had made the bathroom feel a lot smaller.

“Yeah,” the guy who must have been Merlin said. “I was hoping to be civilized.”

“I’m not.” I didn’t even try not to make it a snarl. I was on my knees because of my blistered feet, but I wasn’t going down easy.

“I’m getting that.” He studied me a lot like I was a pebble he’d picked up that turned out to be the wrong shape to skip across a pond. “I don’t actually know much about you.”

I wondered how long Ghostwheel-- or ‘one of the others’ --had been spying on me. I didn’t ask because things Rinaldo had said made me think I’d be better off if Merlin thought I was not very bright. Not all the way to doesn’t-bother-to-tie-his-shoes-before-a-fight, just as near as I could get without him noticing I was doing it. I shrugged. “Not much to know.”

He didn’t quite believe that, but he clearly wanted to. The whole thing would be a lot easier, a lot less dangerous, if I was stupid. It hadn’t occurred to him that, if I was truly stupid I might not understand what Ghostwheel would do if I managed to kill Merlin.

I really didn’t think the monster would thank me.

“What do you do to keep yourself occupied? When you’re not attacking merchants and temples, I mean.” He obviously didn’t think much of me.

“Practice, I suppose.” I shrugged again. “Haven’t needed hobbies.” I had several, actually, beyond being a generalized pain in the ass for Amber and its ruling family. I despised the place and everything it stood for, but Random had never actually done anything to hurt me. I’d mostly stuck around for Rinaldo, and I’d pretty clearly fucked that up.

If Merlin had hurt Rinaldo-- Well, right at the moment there was damn all I could do. But I would. Some day. If Bleys had become King of Amber, I’d have done my damnedest to raze the place. I’d loved my mother enough to do it in her memory. Rinaldo, I loved more than that.

Present tense. I hadn’t found any evidence yet that he was dead.

I wondered if Merlin knew enough to connect me to Brand and so to Jasra and Rinaldo. Would either of them have mentioned me?

“I suppose you’ll find something to occupy yourself.” Merlin sighed as if my boredom was actually a concern for him. Something of my surprise must have showed because he said, “I’ve been there. I don’t get off on torturing people.”

“Bullshit.” I wanted the word back before I quite finished saying it. Whatever else I might do, calling him on that was stupid.

He looked at me for several seconds. “I won’t get off on torturing _you_ ,” he said at last.

I managed something approaching a laugh. “Your pet had to learn it somewhere.”

“Ghostwheel--” He put just the slightest extra emphasis on the name. “--makes his own decisions. He weighs my opinions and interests, certainly, but he doesn’t always agree with me. I’d be a terrible parent if he had to.” Merlin was silent for a moment then went on, “I’d probably have stopped with half that many hellscapes.” He shrugged. “I don’t know your limits, but you can damned well assume that Ghostwheel knows exactly how much each of those worlds scared you.”

He gave me an utterly meaningless smile. “Do you want Sibyl to take a look at your feet? I’ll allow it as long as you understand that taking her hostage just means she dies.” He studied my face. “She knows that. She also knows that you’d pay for her life.”

I thought about the old woman. Yes. She had known both of those things.

“If you hadn’t given her that moment’s warning,” Ghostwheel said, “we wouldn’t offer. Next time, I’ll notice that when you do it.”

He probably would, too.

I really didn’t want Ghostwheel to be a person. I was pretty sure that getting free of Merlin was going to require-- at best-- disabling Ghostwheel.

It took me about a month to understand that Ghostwheel wasn’t even physically present in Merlin’s Ways and another two to understand how easily he could find a person in Shadow.

I didn’t meet any of the others for nearly six months. At that point, I was out of my skull with boredom. I was even reading fiction. I’d never understood the appeal since, given Shadow and the Pattern and our imaginations, it was a lot like reading the history of some place I was never going to visit and didn’t need to know about, but the books were there.

Merlin was always willing to give me books.

A handful of people were in and out of my prison regularly, just to keep the place clean. I’d nearly killed the first one because I hadn’t known he was coming and had thought-- for just a fraction of a second-- that Merlin might be physically there.

Ghostwheel’s response was… not kind. He dumped me into that boundless ocean and left me there until I couldn’t keep my head above water any more. 

And a little bit after that.

He told me, later, after I’d coughed up half the ocean onto the floor of my bathroom, that he’d tracked my involuntary responses to each place he’d taken me. The water world hadn’t hurt me the most, but it had scared me the most.

I didn’t even try to explain that I hadn’t meant to kill the poor bastard with the clean sheets or whatever the hell he’d brought.

Ghostwheel wasn’t going to believe me anyway.

Merlin visited about once a week, always by projection and always staying only long enough to ask if I had any requests I hadn’t wanted to pass through either the servants or Ghostwheel.

I didn’t and wasn’t likely to, but I always tried to keep him there. Some of that was loneliness. Some of that was me knowing that I needed to know him in order to figure out how to play him. I was getting to know Ghostwheel, but Merlin was more elusive.

He obviously didn’t want to risk liking me, but knowing that didn’t give me any leverage.

It wasn’t until after I met Ariyus that I realized that knowing his children was the key to knowing Merlin.

By the calendar Merlin had given me, I knew that it had been 185 days. He’d hemmed and hawed over the calendar until I pointed out that having it would tell me when to expect visitors so that I didn’t try to kill anyone because I was startled.

I did actually try to kill Ariyus when he said hello. I didn’t have any better luck than anyone else would have. Less, even, because I was trying to punch my way through a swarm of tiny whatever-the-hell he was made of. Some sort of technology or magic might have actually touched him.

“Hey!” The black swarm parted around my fist. “Wait! I just wanted to introduce myself.” He sounded almost plaintive. However he’d expected me to react, it wasn’t with my fists.

I’d let myself get more out of shape than I’d thought. I was breathing hard at that point, and it had to be the exertion. There weren’t any other options.

Okay. So I was lying to myself. Does it matter?

“What are you?” I knew that I couldn’t fight whatever this thing was, but maybe it would talk to me.

“I’m Ariyus. I’m Merlin’s fourth child. Use he/him for me. Some of the others have different preferences.”

Sibyl had used the plural, and I hadn’t thought she was referring to Jasra’s children.

“If I wanted to hurt you, you’d never know it was coming.” He didn’t sound smug about it, just matter of fact. “I’m in the air in Shadows that have air. Other places in those that don’t. I just thought you might like something you could see.”

If he was in the air, he was in my lungs. Suffocating me would take a while, but he could.

I made myself relax a little. “It’s easier than a voice out of nowhere.” I wondered how long Ghostwheel would let this conversation continue.

“Ghostwheel’s decided that you’re fine without him watching every microsecond. I’d have talked to you before,” Ariyus sounded almost guilty about it. “Just… Ghostwheel tends to interrupt. He’s a lot older than I am-- well, than this part of me is-- and he keeps wanting the rest of us to download his experiences rather than making our own.”

How old was ‘a lot older’? Merlin was younger than I was.

“I’ll still tell Ghostwheel if you ask for things,” Ariyus said. “I can’t move anything but data.” He paused. “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. I was more afraid of what Merlin’s other children might turn out to be. “Are there a lot of you? Merlin’s children, I mean.”

“By whose standards? The Chaos side tends toward much bigger families, but I suppose we’re big by those standards, too.” 

I didn’t miss that ‘big’ wasn’t a number.

Part of the swarm moved as if it were shrugging. “Only four biological. The rest of us… Merlin’s always working on another. We don’t all end up alive. He wants us to, but… Sometimes, he just makes a machine. I think it’s a good thing for the family that I came out okay because he might have figured Ghostwheel was a fluke.”

I was getting more information about Merlin from this creature than I’d gotten from everyone else I’d talked to in the last six months. Including from Merlin. “Why talk to me?”

“I--” The swarm dissolved into chaos for a moment then reformed. “In all of Shadow, there are only a few biologicals I _can_ talk to. It hurts when a Shadow gets chopped out from what I can reach, when that part of me dies, and people don’t like-- I’m not creepier than Ghostwheel, and a lot of them believe in all-seeing gods. I don’t understand!”

I did. It was easier to pretend Ghostwheel wasn’t there when he wasn’t drawing attention to himself because it was actually possible that he wasn’t, and Ghostwheel would only intervene if he thought it was necessary. His priorities weren’t the same as mine, but they were real. 

This new... being… sounded a lot more like a child and really was, if I understood him, omnipresent. A child who saw and could act on anything-- But no. Ariyus said ‘this part of me’ so he wasn’t-- My brain stopped for a moment as I tried to imagine being in an infinite number of places all at once, aware of each as separate, experiencing each as separate, and-- No.

Even if I didn’t understand, the complaint sounded like something he’d had bottled up for a while, and I thought he might give me more if I was sympathetic, so I shook my head. “People are hard to figure out.”

Ariyus made a rude noise. “I have the data. I’m just not equipped to synthesize it yet.”

Apart from the ‘yet,’ that was some comfort.

“Mostly, I pass data on when someone asks. Merlin says that a central processing location is contrary to my purpose.” His voice took on Merlin’s cadences just for a moment. “He says I can make one if I want and that he’ll help but that it will change who I am, so I should think about it before I do it.”

That… was more generous than I’d thought Merlin might be. Ariyus, as he was, was a powerful tool. “So you and Ghostwheel consider Merlin your father.” I carefully made it not exactly a question. What I really wondered was if Merlin considered them truly children. Neither side of his family was great about treating children as anything but tools.

“We argue about that. I say mother. Ghostwheel says father. But Merlin’s not always a man, and he spends a lot of time on each of us, like a mother with a pregnancy. Ghostwheel says--” Ariyus rather abruptly vanished.

About six seconds later, my lunch appeared on a covered tray on the floor by my feet. Ghostwheel had started doing that after I missed a few meals because I simply didn’t notice there was food in the other room. He didn’t do it if I was in the bathroom or if I was exercising. Otherwise…

It kept me on my toes. I hadn’t tried to kill a tray in weeks.

Merlin didn’t-- quite-- think I was a buffoon, but Ghostwheel really wanted me to be. That was something I could give him, so what the hell.

Ariyus came back later, perhaps three hours after Ghostwheel delivered my lunch. He sort of faded into visibility right in front of me but about six feet away. “It’s easier to edit things out of my records when Ghostwheel doesn’t know there’s something to edit out at all.”

I nodded because that made sense.

But it implied that Ariyus wasn’t supposed to be talking to me.

“I don’t have enough conversations with you to fake anything that way, and he might spot if I used a Shadow of you for ideas.”

“Are there a lot of Shadows of me?”

“Same as everybody else. Except… I haven’t found Shadows of me. I think it might be because I’m already there or maybe…” He hesitated. “It’s possible that I just kind of… eat them when I move into a place where they are. I’m not sentient until there are enough of me there, so I might.”

And that wasn’t disturbing at all. “So Merlin just thought of you one day and made you?”

“Someone else, the person I consider my actual father, suggested it. Merlin did the work, so he’s mother.” Ariyus’s voice was an uncanny imitation of Rinaldo’s, timbre, resonance, intonation.

I flinched. I opened my mouth to ask.

Ariyus lost cohesion for a moment then said in a very distressed tone, “I am specifically forbidden to tell you my father’s name. That and other things.”

Which was as good as telling me, and we both knew it.

I covered my face with both hands and stayed that way for almost a minute. When I looked up, I asked, “Will it hurt you to do what’s forbidden?”

“No.” Ariyus actually sounded startled. “Well, I mean, some of the others would be mad if they realized, but what would they actually _do_? Ghostwheel’s the only one who’s managed to hide his backup from me, and I think that’s mostly because he was hiding it from everything he could think of, even before I came online. Not that I would ever tell.”

“And Merlin?”

“He tells us we have to make our own decisions about things like that. He asked me not to, but it’s always up to us.”

Which sounded like Merlin being a better parent than my mother had been. I cleared my throat but still couldn’t speak for a moment. “Is your father still alive?”

The pause was almost imperceptible. “As of this second, yes.”

“Do you expect that to change?”

“Not with all of us watching to make sure it doesn’t. I… don’t think he wants it to.”

I closed my eyes. “Was there a time when he did?” There was a thread in Ariyus’s voice that suggested terrible things to me.

“None of the people who were around then will tell me. I wasn’t online until after.”

But he guessed.

“There are things that happened to Merlin that Ghostwheel tells us about so we don’t do what Ghostwheel did and think that everything’s okay.”

Well, fuck. If Ghostwheel had witnessed the shit Jasra had probably put Merlin through-- and whatever stupidity Rinaldo had managed-- that explained a lot about his viciousness.

“He doesn’t tell us much about after, but it was almost fourteen years, local, before I came online. Not that local existed before Merlin started building the Ways.”

Fourteen years was a very long time.

“My father doesn’t forget that I’m here, but Merlin does, and Martin does, and most other people don’t know. Sibyl prays in a language no one else in the Ways speaks. She’s not praying to Merlin.”

But Ariyus knew the language. Because he was in Shadows where people could speak it.

“Also, Merlin’s embarrassed about having his biological children see him having sex. He never thinks to hide that from the rest of us. I’m not sure why it’s different.”

I wasn’t either, so I shrugged. Well, I was pretty clear on the part about Merlin being pretty thoroughly fucked up.

My mother hadn’t ever recovered from what my father had done to her.

“Did Merlin kill Jasra?”

“No. Martin did. I think… Ghostwheel doesn’t say, but I think Merlin was afraid to, so Martin did it for him. Her head-- well, her skull-- is in the same room with Werewindle. I think Merlin put it there and then… forgot about it. I’m not sure even Ghostwheel can get into that room.”

“Ariyus--”

“Yes?”

“Are you hoping that I can explain all of this to you?” I wasn’t sure I could.

“No.”

I could tell that was a lie. I let the silence stretch.

“He never visits Jasra’s children, never talks to them.”

I heard the question Ariyus couldn’t even put into words-- Would Merlin abandon his other children the same way. “Where are they?”

“In the Courts of Chaos, with his mother in House Sawall.”

At least he hadn’t just left them in the ruins.

“He talks sometimes about how young Lu-- Jasra’s son-- was when she sent him after Merlin.”

Luke. That was what Rinaldo said that Merlin called him.

Ariyus’s swarm started spinning in wheel shape that I was pretty sure was an imitation of Ghostwheel’s avatar.

“I should have protected him better.” That was my sin to bear. “Ariyus, please. I need a little time. Could we-- could we both pretend that I’m alone right now? I’ll… I’ll explain some of it later.”

Ariyus’s swarm expanded then flickered to invisibility.

Even if Ghostwheel looked in, he wouldn’t know why my face was wet.


End file.
